If Texas Senate race is ‘about the base,’ who’s wooing independents? Are any left?

SAN ANTONIO, TX - OCTOBER 15: U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX) (L) and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) face off in a debate at the KENS 5 studios on October 16, 2018 in San Antonio, Texas. A recent poll show Cruz leading O'Rourke 52-45 percent among likely voters. (Pool / Getty Images)

Steveson, a Marine Iraq combat veteran who works as a millwright on overseas power plants, said he wanted to see O’Rourke unfiltered.

“Video could possibly be manipulated,” he explained at a crowded O’Rourke event at The Pines Theater in his hometown of Lufkin.

Krnavek, a college student, wore a Beto T-shirt to a morning Cruz rally at Austin Hall, a honky-tonk in Nacogdoches.

“I’m not a super-far-left or super-far-right guy,” said the Stephen F. Austin State University junior geography major. “I just want to hear both sides speak.”

Eager to see the genuine article on the stump, Steveson and Krnavek might at first glance seem like independents. Instead, they are oddities of a sort: Each already had voted not for the candidate whose spiel and schtick he was checking out, but for the other guy.

According to political scientists, the two young East Texas voters illustrate a now deeply ingrained trend in statewide contests: Highly engaged citizens are almost entirely locked up by the two sides, in many cases months before Election Day.

As “high information” voters, Steveson and Krnavek are more typical of devoted partisans on each side, even though each said he has ambivalent feelings about his current party.

Texas voters who are true independents generally have less information about politics, said Southern Methodist University professor Cal Jillson.

“Real independents are not the sort of romantic independents that people think about who are willing to look at both parties’ candidates and study their issue positions and make an informed decision,” he said. “Those kind of people are exceedingly rare.”

mobile-only dfpPosition1

Caleb Krnavek, 21, a junior at Stephen F. Austin State University, showed up at a Nacogdoches rally for Sen. Ted Cruz even though he cast an early vote for Cruz's Democratic opponent, Rep. Beto O'Rourke. "It's my civic duty to hear both sides," Krnavek said.(Robert T. Garrett / The Dallas Morning News)

A measly 8 percent

While about a third of Texans tell pollsters they are independents, about 12 or 13 percent of those actually lean Republican and a similarly sized sliver lean Democratic, Jillson said.

“Which leaves you about 10 percent in the middle who are independents,” he said. “It takes a lot of resources to get the attention of real independents.”

Some public polls have shown O’Rourke to be leading Cruz among independents, though not blowing him out.

If that holds in the race’s final week, it could mean a boost of 1 or 2 percentage points to the El Paso congressman — in a close race, potentially important. But it's not enough to come out on top — not without a paradigm-shifting, massive turnout of fervent Democrats.

Jim Henson, who heads the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin and helps conduct internet polling for UT and The Texas Tribune, said true independents make up only about 8 percent of likely voters.

While Democratic groups and O’Rourke have conducted voter registration drives and are now feverishly trying to get sympathetic voters to the polls, “it’s harder to get new Democrats into the system because in the main, they’re younger. They tend to be Latino. And both of those groups have low turnout rates,” Henson said.

Acknowledging his information is anecdotal, O’Rourke has said he doesn't believe that polls are capturing new voters he meets on the campaign trail, especially newly naturalized citizens and young first-time voters.

mobile-only dfpPosition2

For nearly a generation in Texas, Republicans have masterfully used a strategy credited to Karl Rove, the top political adviser to George W. Bush in both Austin and the White House, SMU’s Jillson said.

“Independents vote less regularly than partisans do, know less about politics and are hard to identify, communicate with and turn out,” he said. “So what Karl Rove did is to say, 'To hell with those guys. We’re just going to focus on the people who are already listening to us and already motivated to support us.'"

Common ground ‘magic’

In recent statewide elections, there have been “1 million more conservative votes than there are liberal or progressive votes,” Jillson said.

UT’s Henson said that creates a challenge for Democrats such as O’Rourke.

To attract "newer, particularly younger Democratic voters and particularly more left-leaning young voters who were mobilized in the 2016 campaign, you have to present as a progressive Democratic candidate,” he said.

“O’Rourke certainly looks a lot like a national Democrat,” Henson said. “But he’s also, through personality and nonpolicy things, clearly tried to present himself as somebody who’s above party. He says, ‘I don’t care about Democrats and Republicans.’ That is aimed beyond the base. Are there enough of those voters out there?”

After a speech in Longview on Thursday, O’Rourke disputed the notion that he’s not trying to earn the votes of independents and moderates.

“I haven’t called for impeachment” of President Donald Trump he said, correcting a reporter. He has said, however, that he would vote for a resolution to impeach if presented with one.

mobile-only dfpPosition3

O’Rourke said he’s talking to a large swath of the electorate when he bemoans how many Texas public school teachers hold down two or three jobs to pay their bills, or that the state ranks last in the U.S. in the share of residents lacking health insurance. And it isn’t just liberals who see a need to overhaul immigration laws, he said.

“Republicans and Democrats alike think that,” he said. “The magic is in finding the consensus and common ground. That’s what I want to be able to do. That’s what Texans have long been known for.”

SAN ANTONIO, TX - OCTOBER 15: U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX) (L) and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) face off in a debate at the KENS 5 studios on October 16, 2018 in San Antonio, Texas. A recent poll show Cruz leading O'Rourke 52-45 percent among likely voters.(Pool / Getty Images)

Cruz, asked in Tyler about suggestions that he and O’Rourke have played mostly to their bases, replied, “It is a turnout election. This is a polarized time. There’s a lot of anger. The hard left is turning out.”

He insisted that his “common sense” agenda of low taxes, light regulations, border security and “defending the Constitution” has expanded his appeal beyond the Texas GOP to conservative and moderate Democrats, especially Hispanics, and to independents and libertarians.

Millennial ‘disappointed’ in his generation

Steveson, 35, the Cruz voter from Lufkin, attended an O’Rourke event Thursday and a Cruz one the next day.

He acknowledged that the incumbent hasn’t inspired many millennials.

“I’m a little bit disappointed in my generation,” he said.

mobile-only dfpPosition4

As he waited for Cruz to speak in Nacogdoches, before an audience that was mostly older people, Steveson said, “Look at these people here. They’re retirees, but they’re more likely to vote. They’re not social justice warriors that voice their opinions on social media. They do turn out and cast their ballots.”

Krnavek, the 21-year-old university student, is from Pflugerville and wants to be a city planner someday.

“I’ve never been politically involved until the last two years,” he said.

He started paying closer attention out of concern over human rights and social equality, he said.

“I tend to be conservative on spending,” Krnavek said. “On social issues, I tend to be far more liberal.”

Seeing his O’Rourke T-shirt, an older man interrupted Krnavek’s interview with a reporter: “Which socialist country do you want us to be like, Cuba?” the man said.

While Krnavek said he’d like Democrats to be more concerned about the national debt, Steveson said he’s among Republican millennials who are open to gay rights and marijuana decriminalization.

“I don’t disagree with everything Beto says,” he said.

But he's he’s sticking with Cruz and the GOP.

mobile-only dfpPosition5

“I have two nonnegotiables I can’t compromise on,” he explained. One is the Second Amendment. Steveson said he wouldn’t rule out closing loopholes in background checks for gun purchases. But he said he is adamantly against measures such as former President Bill Clinton’s assault weapons ban. Also, the federal government must crack down on illegal immigration, he said.

“I’m an independent that votes Republican, a libertarian with conservative values,” he said.

'Radicals,' impeachment and Kavanaugh

SMU’s Jillson said that for independents who don’t follow politics closely, a concerted effort by Cruz to paint O’Rourke as “radical” could be off-putting.

“Whatever issue comes up, whether it’s the border or single-payer health care, the idea is that the Democrats are radicals,” he said.

Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are echoing the theme in their re-election efforts, adding to the volume, he said.

UT’s Henson said Cruz doesn’t have to perform the acrobatics that O’Rourke must.

“For Ted Cruz, running a very determined mobilization campaign aimed at simply getting out to vote all of these readily identified Republicans, many of whom have voted for him at least a couple of times already, is the safest and probably the smartest strategy,” he said.

“I don’t know about impeachment but certainly invoking immigration and the cluster of social-identity issues that have emerged from the Kavanaugh hearing, that reinforces the mobilization strategy,” Henson said. Conservatives viewed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing as persecution of white men, while liberals saw it as “the system once again failing women who are victims of sexual assault or harassment,” he said.

mobile-only dfpPosition6

“In a state with a conservative attitude that Texans have at their bedrock, it probably looks like it’s breaking to Cruz’s advantage.”

Robert T. Garrett, Austin Bureau Chief. Bob has covered state government and politics for The Dallas Morning News since 2002.
Earlier, he was a statehouse reporter for three newspapers, including the Dallas Times Herald. A fifth-generation Texan, Bob earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. He covers Gov. Greg Abbott, the state budget, school textbooks and child welfare.